BE-4

Blue Origin's BE-4 will be qualified for flight by the end of 2019 (was 2017)

First BE-4 engine March 2017

Blue Origin plan to produce the BE-4 engine in March 2020 in their upcoming new factory rocket engine production facility in Huntsville, Alabama that broke ground on the factory construction in Jan 2019.

This engine is hoped to be the American replacement for the current Russian RD180 workhorse used for rockets built by the United Launch Alliance (ULA)

The BE4 will be used for ULA's new Vulcan rocket expected to fly around late 2019(now 2020/21).

Since the problems in the Ukraine, The US government has back tracked on forcing ULA to use Russian rocket engines and passed legislation to require ULA now to use an American engine by 2019.

In September 2015, Blue Origin announced high-level details of a planned orbital launch vehicle called 'New Glen', indicating that the first stage would be powered by 7 of its BE-4 engines, and its second stage to be powered by BE-4U a vacuum-optimized BE-4 engine.

BE-4 engines will generate 550,000 pounds of thrust

Robert Goddard’s first rockets used compressed gas to force the liquid propellants into the engine thrust chambers. While simple in design and a logical starting point, he quickly realized the limitations with this approach: it requires thick-walled heavy propellant tanks and limits the engine’s chamber pressure and performance, both of which limit payload capacity. The answer was turbopumps. Store the propellants in low-pressure light tanks, and then pump the propellants up to high pressure just ahead of injection into the main chamber.

For even more performance, you can add one or more boost pumps ahead of the main pumps. Blu Origin have done that on the oxidizer side of our BE-4 engine. Our Ox Boost Pump (OBP) design leverages 3-D additive manufacturing to make many of the key components. The housing is a single printed aluminum part and all of the stages of the hydraulic turbine are printed from Monel, a nickel alloy. This manufacturing approach allows the integration of complex internal flow passages in the housing that would be much more difficult to make using conventional methods. The turbine nozzles and rotors are also 3-D printed and require minimum machining to achieve the required fits.

The OBP was first demonstrated last year in testing (2016), where Blue Origin validated its interaction with a main pump. The second iteration of the OBP for BE-4 is now in test. the’ve also just finished assembly of the unit that we be installed for the first all-up BE-4 engine test early 2017.